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Spy Head
Fiction by M.E. Proctor When we started meeting in the pavilion on top of the dune, Billy was nine years old. Billy’s mom had called the office to tell me he wanted to talk to me. In private, in that place. It struck me as morbid, an unnecessary revisiting of a nightmare. But I’m a…
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But You Still Have To Live With It
A Review of Scott Blackburn’s It Dies With You By Wiley Reiver Good crime novels are never really only about a crime. I’ll go further: Great crime novels aren’t even primarily about legal wrongdoing, its motivations and consequences for perpetrators and victims. The story of the impoverished St. Petersburg student with his borrowed axe and…
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The Fractured Mirror: Winter Solstice, Christmas, and the Axes of Time
By Edward Karshner In the volumes written about the folklore of Christmas, what gets lost is that Christmas, like its cousin winter solstice holidays, is about the restructuring of time. We never really stop to consider that time, like folklore itself, is a construct orienting us to a world that seems, in the words of…
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Plain People
Fiction by James Cato It wasn’t about her looks. She had lovely skin and a sugary smile and nice clothes. In fact, when she hired me to breed shrimp on her aquaponics farm half the boys in the town stopped speaking to me. Nobody knew her origins and myths circulated on where she was sleeping,…
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Healthy Habits: When Disciplines Meet
By Valerie Peralta Every morning when I open my eyes, I know I need to exercise. A three-mile walk, a HIIT workout, and some stretching or yoga. But my running shoes sit in my closet. My workout clothes remain in their respective drawers. And I don’t know exactly when any of this physical activity will…
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The Trophy on My Wall
Creative Nonfiction by Don Alexander I was sitting on a log behind a makeshift blind I had fashioned out of dead limbs and brush. My Winchester 30/30 was resting on a horizontal limb just in front of me. This deer stand was thirty yards above a heavily used game trail in a little mountain hollow…
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We Are All Made of Stars
A review of Jordan Harper’s The Last King of California By Justin Lee “See a scar of smoke across the belly of the sky.” That ominous opening line brings us into Jordan Harper’s The Last King of California. At the offset we are introduced to Beast Daniels, the big bad with bolts that is killing…
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Outsider Perspectives: Matchmaking for the Outsider
By Mandira Pattnaik When I signed up to be a Columnist for Reckon Review, it was a leap of faith for me. I’ve written fiction and poetry, but columns? It was a November day like this, exactly a year ago, and whoops! I had committed to it! I guess I’d trusted my instincts. Several columns…
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Today, Your Secrets are Safe with Me
Creative Nonfiction by Cheryl Skory Suma It made me feel worse, talking about you as if we’d known one another. Everyone assumed we did; what mother and daughter don’t know each other’s stories? All I knew was how important today was for you; how much you needed the approval of the people in that room,…
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The Nitty Gritty: TALKING INDEPENDENT PRESS WITH CASIE DODD OF BELLE POINT PRESS
By Charlotte Hamrick Some time this past summer I became aware of Casie Dodd and Belle Point Press on Twitter. Honestly, I don’t remember why, out of all the presses on Twitter, this one caught my eye (maybe because it’s based in the South?!) but I’ve been following its progress ever since. I feel like…